Your House
by coincidencless
Summary: I'm the man who's gonna burn it down.


**Disclaimer:I do not own Portal or Portal 2. Valve does.**

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><p>Cave Johnson sat in his office, overlooking Enrichment Sphere Pi-Delta. Neil Armstrong had volunteered for the praying mantis test, and due to some, ah, 'complications', he was currently gunning down a mantis-man with a sniper rifle. Yes you read that right, gunning down a mantis man with a sniper rifle. Cave shook his head, flabbergasted as to how somebody could think to gun something down, with a <em>sniper rifle<em>. The door to his office pinged, and Caroline came inside carrying a brown package. He smiled in spite of himself.

"Caroline! Hi!"

"Mister Johnson, some guy sent you this package."

"Some guy? Who?"

"Well sir, you'll never believe me if I told you." Cave smiled. Caroline, Caroline, Caroline. He'd seen people turn into mantis-men, jump fifty feet high off of blue paint, and monkeys type up Hamlet. What could she have that he wouldn't believe?

"Try me."

"Well, the guy said, his name was Life." Life? That was a laugh. Cave thought he'd have one, and he did.

"What's in the package?" His assistant shrugged.

"I don't know. He just told me that he's giving them to you. Better open it." Caroline took a letter-opener from her pocket and sliced open the thin tape holding the package shut. When it opened and revealed it's contents, Cave's face went a deep shade of red. Inside the package were two pairs of sun-yellow lemons. Cave's voice dropped to a threatening whisper, shaking as he tried to keep his anger in check.

"Lemons? I was given... four... sour... lemons. By life." All the anger drained out of him at once and was replaced with slight humor. "Ha, brings new meaning to the phrase, 'when life gives you lemons', doesn't it?"

"Yes sir, it does." Anger started to seep back into Cave.

"This fellow, Life, how did he look?"

"Well, he wore pastels on the top of his body, concealing his face, but as you got lower and lower his clothes were darker, and his shoes were completely black." Cave's face darkened.

"I've seen men turn into monsters, people jumping buildings on a blue jell-o, and a gun shoot deadly portals. This fellow, Life, is probably life." Caroline didn't pick up on what he was saying.

"Of course sir, he said his name was Life." Cave shook his head, anger beginning to well up inside him.

"No no, I mean that guy must actually have _been LIFE!_ Why would life give me lemons, now of all times, when this business is just starting? I DON'T WANT THESE DAMN LEMONS!" Cave swept his hand across the box, knocking it to the floor, spilling it's cargo.

"WHAT-" Cave stomped on one lemon, resulting in a satisfactory _squish_.

"-THE HELL-" He picked up one lemon and chucked it out his window overlooking the enrichment sphere. If you were somehow unable to hear his screaming you would have heard a lemon plop onto a floor about seven seconds alter.

"-AM I SUPPOSED-" He picked up another lemon and literally ripped it in half, citrus juice spraying the floor.

"-TO DO WITH THESE?" He stomped on the last lemon with all of his body weight. Caroline had strangely disappeared once he had calmed down enough to see. Cave sat down at his desk and brought up a phone book and started to flip through it.

"Life, life, life, ah, Life!" He picked up the phone and dialed it. 123-890-4567. R-i-i-ing. R-i-i-ing.

"Yello?"

"Hello, is this, um, Life?"

"Yep, what can I do for you?"

"Well, I demand to speak with your manager." A long pause.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"I DEMAND TO SPEAK WITH YOUR GOD DAMN MANAGER, LIFE!" There was a dial tone.

"GET BACK HERE! Where'd you go?" A long pause. "Where'd you go, come back come back!" Hands shaking in raw fury, Cave dialed the number again. Just like he suspected, nobody answered, and left his message.

"I'll get you life. Just you wait. I'll make you rue this day, Life. I'll make you regret ever giving me lemons. Do you know who I am?" Cave paused for dramatic effect. "I am CAVE JOHNSON. I'm the man, who is going to ruin your life, Life! You'll rue the day you ever thought you could give Cave Johnson, LEMONS!" He hung up and stormed out of his office into the elevator. He punched in the room for 6-A and rode the elevator up. Along the way a new test subject, an Olympian he thought, got on at 2-T, and got off at 5-J to go to the Repulsion Gel tests. Finally, the doors opened, and he stepped out.

He stormed down the white, pristine halls of Aperture Science, the stray employee or two getting out of his way quickly as he bust open the doors to the lab guys. One of them, a young martial artist called Rick, stepped up.

"Oh, heey there Mister Johnson. You out getting yourself a cup of coffee? Man I gotta tell you this day's been full of EXPLOSIONS! It should be getting it's own holiday-"

"CRAM IT RICK!" He shoved the multi-black belt aside and stormed up to Mr. Man (Not his original name, of course), and started to disembowe- I mean, direct his scientific prowess to certain tasks for the good of everyone still alive.

"Combustible lemons? Sir, what use could you possibly have for combustible lemons? I mean, why would you do that?" Another employee stuck her head in.

"For that matter, why are all our tests so dangerous?" Cave's head seemed about ready to explode. He shifted his weight, leaning on a dashboard, pressing the recording button without his noticing.

"Science isn't about WHY, it's about WHY NOT! Why is so much of our science dangerous? Why not marry safe science if you love it so much?" The employee started to open her mouth to speak, but Cave silenced her. "In fact, why not invent a 'special safety door' that won't hit you on the butt on the way out BECAUSE YOU ARE FIRED!" At this Cave noticed he was holding down the button. "Not you test subject, you're doing fine." He turned his attention back to the Harvard graduate, not bothering to get off of the recording button. "Yes, you. Box, your stuff. Out the front door. Parking lot. Car. Goodbye." Fighting back tears the ex-employee ran from the room. Mr. Man cleared his throat.

"So, how combustible do you want them to be, sir?"

"Enough so that when I throw four at a house they will burn it down." The scientist nodded his head.

"Right away, sir." Cave stormed back out to his office, where he spent the rest of the day making recorded messages to either encourage test subjects, send them on a guilt trip, or poke fun at their weight variance.

He went home to his house and fell asleep, and came back the next day for another round of testing. He sat in his office, watching the poor sap in Control group Sputnik-Thirteen try out the blue paint, or as far as they were aware, repulsion gel. Caroline came in, with a smile on her face, carrying a cardboard box. Cave smiled.

"Caroline! What brings you here?" The assistant placed the box on Cave's desk gently, like it were dynamite.

"The engineers finished those combustible lemons you requested" Caroline got a wicked smile on her face. "After you chewed that employee, I'm sorry, ex-employee, out, they got it done A.S.A.P." Cave got a wicked glint in his eye, the kind he got when he 'forgot' to mention to the test subjects they had a chip in their brain that could go to half the temperature of the thermosphere any second.

"Excellent. Let's pay Life a little... visit, shall we?" Cave punched a few buttons on his custom telephone, turning up Life's address. Caroline hooked her arms through Cave's, and the two walked down to the limousine to go to Life's house.

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><p>Life was having as pleasant day as an omnipresent, personification of all life in existence could. It had recently had three hundred thousand humans added to itself, more than making up for the two hundred thousand it lost, aswell as countless other animals. Contrary to popular human belief, the planet's ecosystems weren't dieing, they were thriving, Life was growing more and more powerful daily. That mortal Cave Johnson, pah! What could he do to him? Ruin his life? Life almost laughed at the irony of the disgruntled- and doomed, he'd made sure of that- CEO's threats.<p>

Life returned to his house, a lofty five-story house made seemingly out of sunlight. Only, it wasn't there. Where his house should have been, was a pile of smoldering ruins. Life ran up, looking around frantically. How could this have happened? His existence was tied largely into his house! He would nearly fade into nothing because of this! Sure, he'd recover, but it would be slow and painful, the equivalent of the mass extinction marking the end of the Permian period, marking the beginning of the Mesozoic era, where as much as 83% of all species were wiped off the face of the earth, the closest Life had ever gotten to truly being scoured off the Earth.

He kneeled down at the ruins, the buzz of the loss already beginning to affect him. He gripped a charred wooden beam, it crumbling to ash in his hands. He was losing his touch already! Normally that would've returned the wood to it's natural form, a tree rooted in the nearest open batch of soil. He noticed something out of the corner of his eye. Something yellow. A lemon. It was almost covered by the ash, but Life looked at it anyway. There was another one next to it, almost blackened. He poked the lemon; it burst into flames, making him quickly pull his hand back. Life stepped back, looking at the message spelled out in dozens, hundreds of lemons.

I'M THE MAN WHO'S GONNA BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN WITH THE LEMONS

Life's eyesight went red with rage. The only time he had became this angry when the KT event occurred. He had liked the dinosaurs, and had promptly spent several years stubbornly refusing to help the plants grow. He gripped a lemon in his hand, it catching fire, but Life didn't care. He couldn't die by conventional means. The pain was already settling in. He would make Johnson pay for this. A slow, agonizing death. Poison maybe. Even better, one brought by his own hand. Life smiled through the ripping agony. He would contact his cousin Death and tell him to torture Johnson; contrary to popular belief, Death and Life were good friends. Death could not exist without Life, and without Death, Life would be too overcrowded, imbalanced.

Life's smile faded to a smirk, then a scowl, then an expression of agony as a whirlwind of pain overtook him. He stood up and through the tornado of searing agony, screamed to the heavens.

"LEEEEEEMOOOOONS!"

He would spend the rest of his life making sure Johnson suffered.

And Life would live a long, long time, billions of years, if not more.

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><p><strong>I'm sorry, I really am, but it had to be done.<strong>

**Review, let me know what you think.**


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